We engaged in conversation with historian Robin Judd, author of Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides after the Holocaust, which explored the stories of European Jewish women who lived through genocide and went on to wed American, Canadian, and British military personnel after the war. Judd, whose own grandmother survived the Holocaust and married an American soldier after liberation, offered an intimate portrait of how these unions emerged and developed—from meeting and courtship to marriage and immigration—and showed how they helped shape the postwar world.
About Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides after the Holocaust
Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldiers viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europe: they would help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry. Between Two Worlds shows how these couples helped shape the postwar world by touching thousands of lives, including those of the chaplains who officiated their weddings, the Allied authorities whose policy decisions structured the couples' fates, and the bureaucrats involved in immigration and acculturation. The stories are at once heartbreaking and restorative, and she vividly captures how the exhilaration of the brides' early romances coexisted with survivor's guilt, grief, and apprehension at the challenges of starting a new life in a new land.
About Robin Judd
Robin Judd is a professor of history at The Ohio State University where she teaches courses in Holocaust studies, the history of antisemitism, and the history of leadership. She also serves as the director of Ohio State's Hoffman Leaders and Leadership Program in History. Judd is the author of Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and German-Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933) and Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust, which has garnered two National Jewish Book Awards and was named a finalist for the 2024 Ohioana nonfiction award. She has served on Ohio’s Holocaust and Genocide Memorial and Education Commission since 2021. She serves as past President of the Association for Jewish Studies and the Vice Chair of the Leo Baeck Institute’s Faculty Advisory Board. She has received seven teaching awards and three service awards.
